I live in Los Angeles and I'm lucky enough to write about the thing I love most: movies. I'm a graduate of Vassar College and Northwestern University and for 15 years I worked at Forbes mostly covering the entertainment industry. Although I've moved into the world of corporate journalism, I still contribute blog posts here.

'The Expendables 3' Ends Summer Movie Season With A Whimper

How many movie stars does a film need to get butts into theater seats? Sometimes the answer is none because the concept or intellectual property (book, comic book, old movie etc.) is powerful enough to draw viewers. No one had heard of Daniel Radcliffe or Emma Watson before the first Harry Potter movie hit screens but that didn’t hurt the box office.

In the case of The Expendables, the answer seems to be — the more the better. The first film adorably combined the testosterone power of Sylvester Stallone, Jason Statham and Dolph Lundgren. The second film added Bruce Willis, Jean-Claude Van Damme and the Terminator himself, Arnold Schwarzenegger.

For the third outing, it looks like Stallone has added everyone in his Rolodex. Mel Gibson, Harrison Ford, Wesley Snipes and Antonio Banderas are on board representing the old crowd. Kellan Lutz and UFC fighter Ronda Rousey are the new kids on the block. I haven’t even mentioned Kelsey Grammer, Terry Crews and Glen Powell.

With this many stars, it was inevitable that many of them would essentially be reduced to cameos. According to my colleague Scott Mendelson, “too many cast members crowd out the frame and leave the old-timers with little to do or say.”

The film itself may ultimately disappoint action-movie fans (it earns a 31 out of 100 score on Rotten Tomatoes), but they’ll still head to the theater to at least check it out. Despite a pirated version of the film hitting the Internet a few weeks before the movie went into theaters, Expendables 3 is still expected to top the box office this weekend with $38 million, according to Exhibitor Relations.

That would be the highest opening for the franchise so far and there’s no doubt the long roster of stars has something to do with that. The list of big names in the film is so long it can barely fit on the movie poster, which is clearly part of the point of employing so many actors. It makes for a powerful marketing campaign.

The summer isn’t quite over but late season movies like The Expendables and Let’s Be Cops are going to have to pull in strong numbers to get the summer of 2014 close to the summer of 2013. According to Box Office Mojo, right now the domestic box office, with $3.3 billion in ticket sales, is down 33% from last year. The summer movie season ends Labor day.

There’s no way those numbers come as a huge surprise to Hollywood. Last summer had movies like Iron Man 3 and Despicable Me 2. This summer was actually fairly light on tent pole films. There wasn’t a giant kids movie (sorry How To Train Your Dragon 2) and Marvel decided to try out a new story with Guardians of the Galaxy instead of going for a sequel. The biggest hit of the summer looks like it will be Transformers: Age of Extinction which has already earned $1 billion at the global box office.

That’s all going to change next year when a flood of blockbusters hit theaters in 2015. At least one giant movie is slated to open every weekend next summer including the next Avengers film, the new Terminator movie, a Despicable Me spin off and Ant-Man.

There’s a chance that all of those giant movies could overwhelm movie goers who can only see so many films per week and we’ll see a bunch of expensive movies fail. If that happens, Hollywood might need to rethink its blockbuster strategy or at least spread the big movies out a bit more — something we’re already seeing with this month’s release of Guardians of the Galaxy. August used to be seen as something of a summer dumping ground but now it’s a legitimate month to release a big film. Maybe soon we’ll see that strategy extend into September which is still a very quiet month.

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